Sunday, April 08, 2012

'Pink slime' coversation is nauseating, problematic

Over at the Atlantic, New York University’s Marion Nestle explains that the reliance on lean finely textured beef (or LFTB for short) is a way for the beef industry to get more use out of each cow that gets slaughtered:

For one thing, it solves an enormous problem for meat producers. Only about half the weight of the 34 million cattle slaughtered each year is considered fit for human consumption. The rest has to be burned, buried in landfills, or sold cheaply for fertilizer or pet food.

LFTB recovers 10 to 12 pounds of edible lean beef from every animal and is said to save another 1.5 million animals from slaughter.

If those numbers are correct — and, fair warning, they appear to come from the beef industry — then a ban on pink slime could, potentially, require the slaughter of another 1.5 million cows to maintain current levels of beef consumption....

Kevin Drum is suspicious of one of the underyling assumptions here — namely, that banning pink slime would lead to an additional 1.5 million cows being slaughtered. He cycles through a whole bunch of studies and numbers and argues that the effect would be “maybe a third of what the industry claims.”

Posted at 09:16:42 AM

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"He cycles through a whole bunch of studies and numbers and argues that the effect would be “maybe a third of what the industry claims.”

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